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Delineate has raised $500K across 1 funding round.
Key people at Delineate.
Delineate was founded in 2024 by Emily Nieves (Founder) and Jawad Iqbal (Founder).
Delineate has raised $500K in total across 1 funding round.
Founded in 2024 by Jawad Iqbal and Emily Nieves, Cambridge-based Delineate develops artificial intelligence agents and agentic systems designed to accelerate clinical trial design and model-informed drug development. The company's B2B software platform extracts unstructured data from academic papers, medical charts, patents, and databases such as PubMed and ClinicalTrials.gov to generate actionable insights for pharmaceutical research. Operating with approximately twenty employees, the enterprise provides AI-enhanced search, parameter extraction, biological mechanism exploration, and a web-based modeling copilot for its biopharma clients. Backed by Y Combinator and partner Jared Friedman, the startup has secured $3.2 million in seed funding alongside an active grant from the National Institutes of Health. The technology is currently utilized by two top ten pharmaceutical companies, enabling them to process fifteen times more studies and reduce analysis timelines from months to weeks.
Delineate has raised $500K across 1 funding round. Most recently, it raised $500K Seed in March 2025.
| Date | Round | Lead Investors | Other Investors | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mar 1, 2025 | $500K Seed | — | Y Combinator, Kulveer Taggar, Nate Matherson | Announced |
Key people at Delineate.
Delineate was founded in 2024 by Emily Nieves (Founder) and Jawad Iqbal (Founder).
Delineate has raised $500K in total across 1 funding round.
Delineate's investors include Y Combinator, Kulveer Taggar, Nate Matherson.
Delineate is an AI-driven platform that accelerates clinical trial design and drug development by transforming vast, unstructured pharmaceutical research data into actionable, high-quality datasets. It serves pharmaceutical and biotech companies by enabling faster, evidence-based decision-making, reducing the time and labor traditionally required to aggregate and analyze research papers, patents, and clinical data. By leveraging custom large language models (LLMs) and computer vision, Delineate significantly shortens research timelines from months to weeks, addressing a critical bottleneck in clinical trial optimization and quantitative pharmacology[1][2][4].
Founded in 2024 and based in Boston, Delineate is part of the Y Combinator Winter 2025 cohort and employs around 20 people. Its product targets quantitative pharmacologists, computational modelers, and researchers in pharma and biotech, helping them automate parameter extraction, table and equation digitization, plot analysis, and model replication. This AI co-pilot enhances the speed, accuracy, and scale of evidence synthesis, which is crucial given the high failure rate of drug candidates and the massive R&D investments in the pharmaceutical industry[1][3][4].
Delineate was founded in 2024 by Jawad Iqbal, formerly an AI lead at Lockheed Skunkworks, and Emily Nieves, a PhD from MIT with experience in computational research at Pfizer and AstraZeneca. The idea emerged from the founders’ recognition of the inefficiencies in manual literature review and data extraction processes that slow down drug development. Early traction came from engagements with top-10 pharmaceutical companies, where Delineate demonstrated the ability to increase study throughput and reduce review timelines substantially through its AI-powered platform combined with human quality control[1][4].
Delineate rides the wave of AI-driven transformation in drug development, a sector traditionally burdened by slow, manual data processing. The timing is critical as pharmaceutical R&D budgets exceed $120 billion annually, and clinical research organizations (CROs) represent a $65–$82 billion market. Delineate’s focus on evidence extraction and synthesis addresses a niche within this ecosystem that can yield billions in value by accelerating clinical trial design and reducing costly delays. Its approach aligns with broader trends in AI adoption in healthcare, computational biology, and biotech innovation, helping to de-risk drug pipelines and improve success rates in a notoriously high-failure industry[4][5].
Looking ahead, Delineate is poised to expand its capabilities beyond project-specific datasets toward more continuous surveillance and protocol drafting, potentially increasing its market share within CRO services. Trends such as increasing reliance on AI for real-world evidence generation, regulatory compliance automation, and integration with existing modeling software will shape its trajectory. As the pharmaceutical industry continues to embrace AI for decision support, Delineate’s influence is likely to grow, potentially becoming a standard tool for accelerating clinical trial design and quantitative pharmacology workflows[4][5].
Its founders’ strong technical and industry backgrounds, combined with early traction among top pharma clients, position Delineate well to capitalize on the growing demand for AI-powered drug development tools. The company’s ability to deliver high-quality, defensible data rapidly will remain a key competitive advantage as the market evolves.
